Due to ever-increasing disk drive capacities and effective volume sizes of storage systems, some background data storage processes can take a prolonged amount of time, such as days or weeks depending on the configuration of the storage system. The extended amount of time for the background data storage processes can lead to several issues. For example, certain copy operations cannot complete their copy operations because the operations cannot copy beyond the boundary at which the background process is operating. Additionally, certain remote operations cannot complete synchronization operations until the background process is finished operating. Other synchronization operations consume significant amounts of bandwidth, simply to copy empty disk space. Furthermore, some disk volumes may be unavailable to a host computing system until background formatting, reconstruction, and/or rebuild operations complete on the disk volumes. Thus, the disk volumes may be unavailable for extended periods of time. The disk volumes may alternatively be available but running in a degraded state, which can result in lower performance and risk that failure in another drive will cause loss of data.
Companies continue to increase disk drive capacity in storage systems to meet increased demand for storage space. However, the increased disk drive capacity can have a negative impact on system performance as well as network bandwidth usage for background processes. Thus, current tools for storage management do not scale well with the increasing capacity of storage devices and storage partitions.
Descriptions of certain details and embodiments follow, including a description of the figures, which can depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein.